Fruity

Fruity, the package manager

Last year I blogged about the automated pipeline we have set up at Box UK to manage our PEAR repository at http://pear.boxuk.net. Although at the time this was a new system we’d put in, we had already found it was working well and hoped other people would too. The tool at the heart of our system is called Fruity, and is written in Clojure.

Our motivations for choosing this setup were covered in my blog post linked above; please go back and take a look if you would like to find out more about the background.

Overview

As I mentioned in my earlier post, one of the benefits of having an automated package deploy system is that we don’t need to worry about how that stuff is done. With this in mind Fruity has been developed to deploy not just PEAR packages, but also Clojure projects to Clojars.org. It’s then easy to plug other types of package distribution in as well.

Fruity is mostly just a wrapper around a bunch of other tools like PEAR, Pirum, Leiningen, SVN and Git. It watches libraries from various sources for new tags, and on detecting one builds the appropriate package for that library and adds it to the configured repository. Simples.

Getting Fruity

It’s easiest to just download the latest executable file, but if you want to build Fruity from source you’ll need to install Leiningen, and then clone the Git repository.

This will create the bin/fruity executable which you’ll be able to run (but don’t do that yet!).

Fruity config

Fruity stores all its config in a single configuration file, and there’s an example provided with the source code named config.clj-sample. The file is written in Clojure, but don’t worry if you don’t know that – it’s very readable. In this config file you can add the information about the libraries you want to package, and any other information required for particular distribution channels.

It’s recommended to take a copy of this file and put it in source control somewhere. You can then pull it in when running Fruity.

PEAR projects

Fruity uses Pirum to manage the PEAR channel. Pirum is a brilliant tool which makes dealing with the arcane intricacies of PEAR channels simple. If you don’t have it you can get it using the instructions available at http://pirum.sensiolabs.org/. You can then create your channel XML file, which will go something like this…

Notice this is just an array of libraries, and for each you need to specify: its PEAR name; its type as being :pear; the URL to fetch its source code from; whether it’s Git or SVN; and optionally a command to use to create the package. If you don’t specify the packageCommand it will default to pear package. You can use the string $VERSION to insert the version of the library being built into the package command – this way you don’t have to hard code it anywhere.

Clojars projects

Configuring Clojars projects is quite a bit simpler as we don’t need to manage the channel like with PEAR. So just add your library like this:

Make sure the name matches your project’s exact name as it will be packaged.

Putting it together

With all the pieces in place you can now run Fruity! Just pass the Fruity executable the path to your config file:

./bin/fruity /path/to/config.clj

Assuming everything is set up right, you’ll then see some output showing Fruity iterate through your libraries checking them for unpackaged tags. If it finds any it should build the package and add it to the correct distribution channel.

You’re not going to want to run this manually, so get it configured on a build server and kicked off as frequently as suits your needs via something like Jenkins. Bosh!

Plugins

Fruity also allows you to load your own plugins to add more library/backend repository types. How to do this is beyond the scope of this article but if you’d like a go and know some Clojure you should be able to work it out from the sample config file and the current codebase. If you do add plugins please let us know through our GitHub channel and we’ll try and add them to core Fruity!

Conclusion

Fruity wraps up a bunch of different tools, and removes the need for us to potch around with building and deploying packages. We hope you find it useful too.

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